‘Leaving No One Behind.’ This Van Is Bringing Education to Some of India’s Most Underprivileged Kids

India has the largest youth population in the world and shoulders a massive responsibility in ensuring all children have access to education. This mobile-classroom is a welfare project established to bring education to some of India’s underprivileged children.

An educational van aiming to bringing education as well as fun to the lives of underprivileged children has hit the roads of Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh.

Larsen & Toubro and Prayas Trust are behind this new welfare project, which hopes to promote inclusivity in education amongst underprivileged children across the country.

‘Fun N Learn’ is a mobile-classroom that aims to bring education, focusing on science, mathematics, history and geography, to various government and non-government schools as well as orphanages. Designed by Children Toy Foundation, the van has been kitted with educational resources, such as maps and maths games, as well as toys and illustrated posters to teach the children lessons on morality.

Devendra Desai, founder and managing trustee of Children Toy Foundation was reported by The Hindu as saying, “Our target is to visit ten to twelve schools every month. We have introduced the same model in Mumbai with three vans and with one in Uttar Pradesh.”

Goal 4 of the UN Sustainable Development targets for 2030, which hinge on the importance of educating and empowering youth to enable human development, dictates that countries have an obligation to ‘ensure inclusive and quality education for all and promote lifelong learning.’ Given that India has the largest youth population in the world, it shoulders a massive responsibility in driving the realisation of this fundamental goal.

Article 31 of the United Nation Convention on the Rights of a Child (UNCRC) states that all children have the right to play and relax by doing things like sport, music and drama. The individuals behind this new initiative claim that staff have been educated on this and will be working to spread awareness on this important right among the children that they reach.

Similar initiatives have sprung up in recent years across parts of the UK in an attempt to make education more inclusive and accessible to hard to reach youth. The School Bus Project is one such example of a need to address the rising number of child refugees in camps who lack access to education. The project was set up by a group of volunteers who decided to turn old buses into mobile education centres capable of providing education to over 800 people at a time. Each bus contains all the equipment needed to create a pop-up school, including teaching resources, books, stationery supplies and stackable seating and is run by a group of teachers, education specialists and doctors.

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